Tomas Vortuba has a new post to his site sharing some of his experiences with static function analysis (and fixing) and the trap he got himself into when evaluating the current state of his code. This is a continuation of his series covering the use of the SymfonyCodingStandard package.

PHP story with code examples, copy-cat killers, just a little bit of static, consistency, sniffs and way to prevent all that ever happening ever again.

In his post he uses an example "fixer" for testing DocBlock comments to see if they provide much useful information over what the PHP itself provides. He dives "under the surface" and looks at the steps it takes to accomplish this. He then gets to the "trap" part, showing the code behind the fixer and how depending on 3rd party packages and their parsing lead to code mistakenly being "fixed". He finishes up the post with a look at a few solutions that could help make these "traps" easier to fix including dependency injection and preventing the issue specifically with static functions.